Last night we conducted a poll of voters we identified as likely to vote in the 2014 Republican Primary based on their past voting behavior.

Deal Job Approval 65 Percent

Asked “Do you approve or disapprove of the job Governor Nathan Deal is doing in bringing new jobs to Georgia?” 64.98% of respondents answered that they approve, versus 17.97% who disapprove and 17.05% who are undecided.

This represents a nearly 5 percentage point improvement over the same measure in January 2013.

Deal’s approval increases to 73.04% among respondents who say they are “very likely” to vote in the 2014 Republican Primarywith 11.57% of selected respondents disapproving and 15.39% undecided.

Disclaimer: I edit InsiderAdvantage.com, which is owned by InsiderAdvantage, but I do not participate in that firm’s polling and they don’t participate in GaPundit’s. Frankly, you’ll likely know about our poll before my boss does.

That’s nearly identical to the 37/40 spread we found for him in early December. Nevertheless Deal looks like a favorite for reelection. He would lead Jason Carter 46/38 and John Barrow and Kasim Reed 48/38 in hypothetical match ups. This may be a situation where Deal’s unpopularity would let a strong Democratic candidate make the race competitive, but it would be hard for a challenger to actually get to 50%.

Senate Ballot

In a four-way Senate ballot test, the announced candidates Congressman Paul Broun, Phil Gingrey, and Jack Kingston cluster in the mid-to-high teens along with former Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel, who announced this morning for the Senate. Businessman David Perdue trails the experienced contenders with under 6 percent of respondents choosing the cousin of former Governor Sonny Perdue.

The differences among top-tier candidates are not only statistically insignificant but actually insignificant and don’t tell you anything new. Most polls of this question showed similar results with current Congressman clustered in the teens. It’s also hardly surprising that a potential candidate with no prior ballot experience would score in the single digits. At this point, the numbers most likely to affect the eventual outcome are in the “cash-on-hand” column of FEC disclosures.

Call it a wide-open race and we’re so far out we can’t even see into the first turn. But we know that two of the candidates have significantly more fuel than the others.

Methodology

This survey was conducted May 16, 2013 by IVR (“Robopoll”) and included 1351 respondents. The margin of error is 2.66 percentage points when using the entire sample. For self-identified very likely voters, the sample size was 933 respondents and margin of error is 3.21 percentage points.

Weighting was applied to the sample to bring the distribution of age ranges in line with those of actual voters in the 2010 Georgia Republican Primary as tabulated by the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office.

The Senate Ballot question was asked:

If the Republican Primary for US Senate were held today and the candidates were Paul Broun, Phil Gingrey, Karen Handel, Jack Kingston, and David Perdue, for whom would you vote?